Kyiv, Ukraine – The robbery began when a mysterious man in a white lab coat appeared at the museum.
A detachment of Russian soldiers stood behind him with rifles and watched impatiently.
Using long tweezers and special gloves, the man in the white apron carefully removed dozens of special gold artifacts more than 2,300 years old from cardboard boxes in the basement of a museum in Melitopol, a southern city in Russian-occupied territory, Ukrainian officials said. The gold objects are from the Scythian Empire and date from the fourth century BC
Then the mysterious expert, the Russian soldiers and the gold disappeared.
“The orcs have taken over our Scythian gold,” said Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fyodorov, using a derogatory term that many Ukrainians reserve for Russian soldiers. “This is one of the largest and most expensive collections in Ukraine and today we do not know where they got it from.”
This was hardly the first attack on Ukrainian culture since the beginning of the war.
In Mariupol, a city that has been hacked by Russian forces for weeks, officials said Russian agents broke into an art museum and stole paintings of masterpieces, a famous sculpture and several highly prized Christian icons.
Across Ukraine, officials said, dozens of Orthodox churches, national monuments and cultural heritage sites have been destroyed. In a town near Kyiv, Borodyanka, Russian soldiers shot a bust of a famous Ukrainian poet in the head.
On Saturday, Ukrainian authorities said more than 250 cultural institutions had been damaged or destroyed.
But perhaps no cultural robbery has been as brazen as what took place in Melitopol just a few days ago.
According to Leyla Ibrahimova, director of the Melitopol Museum of Local Lore, the trouble began in late February when Russian forces shelled the airport and took over the city. The soldiers went wild, smashing supermarkets, shops and homes.
Most of the city’s residents hid in their homes. But several museum workers, including Ms. Ibrahimova, returned to the museum.
It is an elegant, three-story, stone building in the old part of the city, home to 50,000 exhibits, from Soviet-era medals to old battle axes. But his prized collection was a set of rare gold ornaments from the Scythians, a nomadic people who founded a rich, powerful empire centered in the Crimean peninsula, which has existed since about the eighth century BC. until the second century AD
It was Ms. Ibrahimova who was most worried about Scythian gold.
She and other staff members secretly hid it and some other historical artifacts in cardboard boxes, hiding the boxes in a damp cellar where they didn’t think anyone would find them.
“We knew that anyone could enter the museum at gunpoint at any moment,” she said. So they worked fast, she said, because “the collection is priceless.”
In mid-March, Ms. Ibrahimova said Russian troops stormed her house with machine guns, threw a black hood over her head and abducted her. After several hours of intense interrogation, she was released. Two weeks later, she left Melitopol in an area not under Russian control.
But on Wednesday, she received a call from a security guard at the museum. The officer said Russian soldiers, along with intelligence officers and a Russian-speaking man in a white lab coat, came to her home in the morning and ordered her to go with them to the museum under gunfire.
They ordered her to take them to the Scythian gold.
The employee refused, said Ms. Ibrahimova. But the man in the white coat still found the boxes with the help of Ukrainian Yevgeny Gorlachev, who was appointed by the Russian military as the museum’s new director, she said. A Russian team filmed part of the robbery.
“We hid everything, but somehow they found it,” she said.
What was stolen: at least 198 gold items, including ornaments in the form of flowers; gold plates; rare old weapons; 300-year-old silver coins; and special medals. She said many of the gold artifacts were given to the Scythians by the Greeks.
In an interview with Russian television, Mr Gorlachev said the gold artifacts were “of great cultural value to the entire former Soviet Union” and that previous museum administrators “spent a lot of effort and energy” to hide them.
“No one knows for what purpose,” he said. “But thanks to these people and the operational work done, the residents of the town of Melitopol – and not only Melitopol – will be able to observe a large collection of Scythian gold again. He did not say when or where the artifacts would be displayed.
Mrs. Ibrahimova, speaking on the phone, sounded desperate as she spoke of the Russian invaders.
“Maybe culture is the enemy for them,” she said. “They said that Ukraine has no state, no history. They just want to destroy our country. I hope they don’t succeed. “
Scythian gold has great symbolic value in Ukraine. Other collections of artifacts were stored in warehouses in the capital Kyiv before the outbreak of war. But Ms. Ibrahimova said events have unfolded too quickly for her museum to complete its collection.
For years, Ukraine has been embroiled in a complex dispute with Russia over Scythian gold collections that several Crimean museums have donated to a museum in Amsterdam. After Russia took over Crimea in 2014, Ukraine asked the Amsterdam Museum not to return the gold. Russia has asked the museum to do just that. The court ruled in favor of Ukraine and the gold remains in Amsterdam.
But historians say the looting of artifacts in Melitopol is an even more egregious attempt to appropriate and possibly destroy Ukraine’s cultural heritage.
“The Russians are waging war without rules,” said Alexander Simonenko, a fellow at the Ukrainian Archaeological Institute and a Scythian specialist. “This is not a war. It destroys our lives, our nature, our culture, our industry, everything. This is a crime. “
The employee, who refused to help the Russians, was released on Wednesday after the gold was stolen. But on Friday, she was again taken from her house with a gun, Ms Ibrahimova said shortly after the mayor, who is also in exile, announced the theft.
She hasn’t been heard from since.
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